Researchers have identified a potential drug combination treatment to combat pancreas cancer, the third mostly deadly form of cancer.

One drug intervenes with lysosomes, so that essential nutrients cannot be recycled anymore. The other drug blocks the pathway to repair DNA. Together, they have synergistic effects, meaning that their effect when combined together is bigger than the sum of their individual actions.

The combined drug therapy has now successfully been tested in mice, and there is hope that this may lead to an effective strategy for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, known to be very resistant to single drugs.

With increasing age, blood vessels stiffen and degrade, leading to increased risk of cardiovascular disease in the elderly. Scientists have found a surprising culprit for this: changes in the gut microbiome.

Studies in mice have revealed that aging comes with more “bad” bacteria that appear to at the basis of increased inflammation, stiffening arteries, and decreased health of the vascular endothelium (the inner lining of blood vessels). When applying antibiotics in old mice to eliminate most of the bacteria living in the gut, vascular health improved to the cardiovascular condition seen in young mice.

Researchers believe that diets high in probiotic-rich cultured food (yogurt, kefir, kimchi) and prebiotic fiber could play a role in preventing heart disease by promoting a healthy gut microbiome.

Hydrogen is an appealing option for fuel, because burning it produces only water, no carbon dioxide. As powering cars and cities would take enormous amounts of hydrogen, it seems impossible to use purified water to obtain sufficient amounts of hydrogen, especially in more arid areas of the planet.

Now researchers have discovered a way to split seawater (the Earth’s most abundant source for chemical energy) into hydrogen and oxygen by a process called electrolysis. The corrosive effects of chloride in the seawater was prevented by a special coating on the anode.

This method might prove useful for hydrogen production at large scale in the future.

A clear link has been found between increasing temperatures, and decreasing number of migrating and breeding waterbirds in the Great Basin in the American west.

With increasing temperatures, especially over the last few decades, melted snow water arrives earlier in the Basin, and summers are warmer, dryer, and longer. As a consequence, availability of fresh water diminishes, and the remaining water becomes more salty. This is especially bad news for hatchlings, as they have still to develop their salt glands and do not support higher salinity.

Thus, climate change has already a visible impact on wetland ecosystems in the west of the USA.

This could be a hurdle to consider before we think of space exploration and settling on Mars. A NASA research has shown that Herpes virus reactivated in more than 50% of crew aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station.

The research states that during spaceflights there is a rapid rise in stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline which suppresses the immune system. These conditions persist for longer durations which contribute to reactivation of the viruses.

However, so far, the reactivation of the virus is mostly non-symptomatic. However continuous shedding of the virus from these astronauts continued for more than 30 days after returning to earth which could hamper immunocompromised individuals they come in contact with on earth.

A long-term study based in the US has shown that higher amount of sugar-sweetened beverages consumed is associated with higher risk of premature death especially from cardiovascular diseases and also to a small extent cancer.

The sugar-sweetened beverages such as carbonated and non-carbonated drinks, energy drinks, fruit drinks are the single largest source of added sugars consumed in the US. They alone exceed the daily recommended sugar consumption by atleast 10%.

Compared to drinking less than 1 sugary drink per month, drinking 1-4 per month increased risk of death by 1%, 2-6 per week increased this risk by 6%, 1-2 per day increased it by 14% and 2 or more per day increases it by 21%. That’s a high risk to avoid if we kick the habit of drinking Cola’s, don’t you think?

Researchers have developed a relatively simple method that restored vision in blind mice suffering from retinal degeneration. The mice were able to see motion, brightness changes over a thousandfold range and detail on an iPad that was sufficient to distinguish letters.

The technique consists of injection an inactivated virus that carries a gene for a light-sensitive receptor, the green cone opsin. This is targeted to the retinal ganglion cells, and makes them light-senstive.

The researchers expect to start clinical trials on humans with retinal degeneration in as little as three years.

Scientists and clinicians search for biosensors that accurately reflect metabolite concentrations and effects of drugs in the blood.

It turns out that measurements in sweat hold great promise for such continuous, noninvasive testing. They give very similar results as measuring in blood, and the secretion of sweat can be controlled and stimulated, even if a person is resting and cool.

Sweat sensors are under development, and the first sensors, the size of a Band-Aid that can be applied on the skin, are likely to become available soon.

Scientists have developed a faster test, which is able to identify how single bacteria react to antibiotics. Importantly, the susceptibility to an antibiotic can be ascertained in one-hour as compared to the 1-2 day in culture tests.

The technique involves micro-channels on a glass side along which the bacteria swim. These channels induce the bacteria into tiny traps, and then the scientists can inject drugs and observe how the bacteria, reacts under a microscope.

This information could help in our fight against antibiotic resistance because how drugs affect single bacteria could help our clinicians choose the right antibiotic, thereby decreasing the incidence of use of prolonged treatments with less effective bacteria which contributes to antibiotic resistance.

Researchers are crushing our omelette. A new study indicates that adults who eat more eggs and other dietary cholesterol had a significantly higher risk of death due to any cause. ANY CAUSE. That’s not good.

However, the real message is not about eggs but about cholesterol, which is more in eggs especially in egg yolk. This also indicates that the current recommended dietary standards for egg need to be revisited.

This study had a median follow-up period of 17.5 years and during which approximately 6000 deaths occurred in the study population. The startling fact was that exercise, overall diet quality or the type of fat did not change the association between high dietary cholesterol and death risk.

The analysis of the DNA of the remains of ancient inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) shows an influx of Russian men around 4,500 BC.

They came from a steppe region north of the Black Sea, and replaced the male Iberian population in about 500 years.

This phenomenon of only male newcomers replacing the original male population is known as sex-bias, which had previously been found in India, where men from the very same region in Russia arrived at roughly the same time as they did in Spain and Portugal.

The part of the human cortex that is known as the insula has been found to be able to discriminate tastes, a new study reports.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and novel statistical methods, it turned out that the insula not only responds to different tastes (sweet, bitter, sour and salty), but also encodes these sensations by different activity patterns.

This is the first time that there is evidence for a human gustatory cortex, capable of distinguishing tastes.

Mushrooms are usually liked across the population for their taste and texture. Now researchers have found that elderly who consume more than two portions of mushrooms a week have a 50% reduced chance of developing mild cognitive impairment.

The scientists studied six commonly used Mushrooms namely, golden, oyster, shiitake, white button, dried and canned. They believe that the advantages offered by all these mushrooms could be due to a common ingredient called ergothioneine due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Further previous research has shown that ergothioneine deficiency increases risk for neurodegeneration and hence the next step is to test these results in a controlled clinical trial.

Researchers have found out that children are spending more time at home with their parents than before, but this has not increased the together time spent by them such as watching TV or eating. Rather, there is an increase in the ‘alone-together’ time.

This ‘alone-together’ time has increased by nearly 30 minutes a day from 2000 to 2015 and this is attributed to rapid increase in home internet and personal mobile devices.

However, all is not bad since there is not change in the time spent in shared activities, which continues to be 90 minutes per day. However, it is possible that there is a feeling of poor quality family relationships due to increased time spent on mobile devices.

Researchers have found out that choosing to forget something requires more mental effort than remembering it. Further, the research indicates that, if one wants to forget an unwanted experience, one needs to focus more attention on it.

This study focused on the sensory and perception areas of the brain, i.e. the ventral temporal cortex and found that humans have an ability to control what they want to forget but it requires more activity in this brain region than when we are trying to remember these memories.

This could help form the basis of therapy necessary to eliminate memories, which can trigger maladaptive responses, so that we can form new more healthy memories.

https://sciencebriefss.com/brief-science-news/short-news-technology-innovation-startups/wearable-technology-to-convert-mechanical-energy-to-electricity
How cool is this? Researchers have developed a movie inspired liquid formula which is a wearable technology that converts the mechanical energy due to movement to electricity. The team invented a liquid-metal-inclusion based triboelectric nanogenerator which harvests energy, and this is predicted to be $480 million market by 2028.

This wearable system senses the biomechanical signals from our body and then use this converted energy to power technological devices. This is fascinating since this technology coverts energy which would be otherwise wasted and puts it to powering devices.

The potential applications range from wearable sensors, advanced health care, human machine interface as well as Internet of Things.

We need to give more credit to kids than we do. Infants who are as young as 5 months are able to distinguish between friends and strangers. Smart, isn’t it?

It has been recently shown that colaughter, i.e. two or ore people laughing simultaneously allows adult listeners to evaluate the nature of relationships between people. This seems to hold true even for kids.

When exposed to social interactions in which the infants were shown pictures of two people laughing together, the infants spent more time looking at them if they were friends. They also listened to colaughter of friends longer than strangers thereby proving that they could predict the nature of the relationships.

When you are suffering from high-blood pressure your doctor tells you to decrease your salt and alcohol intake, both which you don’t want to do. Your doctor also puts you on certain blood pressure lowering pills. All these measures reduce your blood pressure by 5-7 mm Hg on an average.

Its now understood that taking an afternoon nap also decreases your blood pressure by the same magnitude and this is something you would willingly do, wont you? Its also shown that patients ended up needing fewer antihypertension drugs to maintain their blood pressure.

This finding is extremely important since even a drop in blood pressure by 2 mm Hg reduces the risk of heart attacks by as much as 10%. Off you go to sleep?

This question has been bugging biologists since several years. Why do animals sleep when there is this constant threat of predators? Researchers have found the first evidence of an unexpected function of sleep.

They used 3D time-lapse imaging technique in live zebrafish and were able to show that single neurons require sleep to perform nuclear maintenance. DNA damage can occur due to several reasons like radiation, oxidative stress and regular neural activity. This damage accumulates during wakefulness and can reach unsafe levels too.

Sleep helps in repairing this DNA damage in each neuron. The DNA repair process does not occur efficiently during wakefulness and requires an offline sleep period during which there are reduced inputs. This could explain how sleep and sleep disturbances can affect brain performance as well as ageing and other brain disorders.

Researchers visited the Yellowstone National Park for an entirely different reason. To capture bacteria from the hot springs that eat and breathe electricity. The scientists left a few electrodes submerged in the pools of hot water and came back after a month to collect these electrodes and analyze them. Surprisingly, they were able to capture these heat-loving bacteria.

These bacteria could be our answer to our current existential crisis, mainly pollution and energy. These bacteria can ‘eat’ the pollution causing toxins and, in the process, produce electricity. The electricity produced can be used for low-power applications.

After the ‘Berlin patient’ 10 years ago, another patient treated with stem cells from donors who have genetic mutation that prevents expression of an HIV receptor CCR5 has shown sustained HIV remission even after stopping treatment. This patient is named as the ‘London patient’.

The patient was first diagnosed with HIV in 2003 and has been on anti-retroviral therapy since 2012. However, he developed Hodgkin's Lymphoma and hence received a haematopoietic stem cell transplant from a donor with two copies of the CCR5Δ32 allele in 2016.

The CCR5 receptor is important for the HIV to enter the host cells and mutation in these receptors prevents it from doing so thereby preventing the infection of host cells. Knocking out the CCR5 receptor in patients with HIV could be one way to use gene therapy in treating HIV.

Researchers have developed a mobile bio-printer, which can allow bi-layered skin to be printed directly into the wound. The system can scan the wound to measure its dimensions accurately and then directly deposit the skin onto the wound, providing direct on-site management.

While the current gold-standard is to use skin grafts its major limitation is the limited region from which it can be harvested and the skin could be rejected too.

For this new system the fibroblasts and keratinocytes, which can be easily isolated from the skin and expanded, are mixed in a hydrogel and placed in the bioprinter. These cells are then deposited in directly in the wound so that new skin can grow outwards from the centre of the wound.

Insulin is a hormone that helps the body remove glucose from the blood. Its counterpart is glucagon, another hormone that stimulates the production of sugars by the liver. It was believed that they have opposite functions, with glucagon being a risk factor for diabetes.

Now, a new study provides evidence that this is not always the case. A team of scientists showed that glucagon has an additional role: it prepares the liver to become more responsive to insulin making it more efficient in decreasing sugar levels. This is true after a fasting period, for example after sleep when glucagon prepares the liver to respond to the next breakfast.

The study shows that glucagon needs a protein called PGC1A to control this response of insulin. In this context, more glucagon is actually beneficial because it speeds up the time required to return blood sugar levels to normal. The research might help develop new therapeutic approaches for diabetes.

The ichthyosaurs, sea monsters of the Mesozoic era, changed their body shape during evolution in order to swim more efficiently. To better understand how this happened, a team of scientists used computer simulations and virtual environments.

They created 3D models of several ichthyosaurs, but also of the bottlenose dolphin, a species that we know very well. This helped the researchers to understand that the bigger, more evolved animals moved more efficiently by beating their tails instead of using body movements as the earlier species did.

The results offer precious insights into the ecology of the ichthyosaurs and enhance our understanding of their motion.

https://sciencebriefss.com/brief-science-news/short-news-technology-innovation-startups/wow-a-four-legged-robot-doing-backflips
MIT researchers have developed a four-legged robot. Weighing just 20 pounds, it can get back into its natural position in a blink even when it is pushed to the ground. The most impressive stunt this robot can do is a 360 degree back-flip.

The scientists state that this robot, which they call ‘mini-cheetah’ is virtually indestructible and can recover with little damage even when it stunts go wrong. And if it breaks, the scientists have been smart to use only off the shelf parts so that it can be restored to its back-flipping potential at no significant higher costs.

They tested the mini-cheetah in an obstacle course in the lab and made it do yoga poses and found that it is very flexible while maintaining its balance at the same time.